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LGBT+ rights advocates and feminists have argued in favour of the pronoun's use, arguing that it makes the language more inclusive and less sexist. [15] [16] [17] Some advocates have also raised concerns that lack of gender neutral options in French might force non-binary people to turn towards languages that do have more prominent gender neutral options instead, notably the English language.
French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. [1]
This leads to sentences such as (5a) in English, and (6a) in French. Example of gender-neutral masculine: English (5) a. If anybody comes, tell him. masculine him used to refer to a person of unknown sex b. *If anybody comes, tell her. feminine her is not used to refer to a person of unknown sex Example of collective masculine: French (6) a.
In regard to word order, French is more restrictive than other Romance languages. For example, Spanish allows for all six possible word orders, compared to French’s three. Additionally, unlike other Romance languages, specifically Spanish and Italian, French does not have free inversion, which is often explained by French not being a pro-drop ...
French has a complex system of personal pronouns (analogous to English I, we, they, and so on). When compared to English, the particularities of French personal pronouns include: a T-V distinction in the second person singular (familiar tu vs. polite vous) the placement of object pronouns before the verb: « Agnès les voit. » ("Agnès sees ...
The same can happen in French with the epicene elided singular articles (l'), the definite (les) and indefinite (des) plural articles, and the contractions aux (à + les) and des (de + les) when in contact with the noun, so the adjective takes the task of marking the gender:
To make words or phrases gender-inclusive, French-speakers use two methods. Orthographic solutions strive to include both the masculine and feminine endings in the word. Examples include hyphens (étudiant-e-s), middle dots (étudiant·e·s), [32] parentheses (étudiant(e)s), or capital letters (étudiantEs). The parentheses method is now often ...
Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. [15] Worrorra: Masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective. [16] Halegannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist in present-day Kannada. Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.